Krita Gemini

Today, the Krita project releases Krita 3.0. We've worked over a year on the port to Qt5, implementing animation support and much, much more. There is Instant Preview, which makes it possible to work on bigger canvases, there is an improved layer panel, new filters, g'mic now works reliably. It's a huge release!

You can get Krita 3.0 on steam by right-clicking your Krita Gemini entry in the software library, clicking on Properties and in the Beta tab selecting desktop30.

We will likely replace the current Krita Gemini 2.8 with Krita Desktop 3.0 down the road: with the port to Qt5, the tablet part of Krita Gemini broke irreparably. We spent a lot of time (and money) trying to rewrite it, but it needs a full redesign, and that will take even more time.

It's taken a little while (that and we forgot to make an announcement when we pushed an update previously...) but we're happy to announce that there is an update to the desktop29 branch. This took a little longer as we encountered some problems with a previous update and didn't want to release it until we had a chance to fix it.

Just a quick shout for anyone who missed the announcement on the Krita Twitter feed - Boud will be joining the LIVE Floss Weekly today (Wednesday) at 08:30 PST (in about 15min!)

We're not talking dentistry here; FLOSS all about Free Libre Open Source Software. Join host Randal Schwartz and his rotating panel of co-hosts every Wednesday as they talk with the most interesting and important people in the Open Source and Free Software community.

There is now a new "desktop29" entry in "Betas", which has the very latest build of Krita Desktop 2.9 Beta 2 if you fancy trying it out :D

There are lots of nice features in 2.9 - the big change that you'll see is that now Krita opens multiple images in the same window and there are number of tabs above the canvas as you create new or open other images. It also allows you to open multiple different views of the same image. Under Settings->"Configure Krita" you'll see an option for "Multiple Document Mode" which lets you choose between the tabbed layout or sub-windows.

You will also see that there have been improvements in memory handling, brush response and shortcut handling.A much more detailed list is available via the announcement on the Krita website.

If you want to try it out now, either:

Follow the instructions How to enable the Beta branch, substituting "desktop29" instead of "beta" - this will replace your Krita Gemini 2.8 installation with Krita Desktop 2.9, but will continue to take advantage of the steam cloud saving of settings.

Download the latest build of as an installer or ZIP file from http://files.kde.org/krita/windows/ - if you scroll to the bottom of the list you should fine the latest builds (currently krita_x64_2.8.91.2)

You may want to make a back-up copy of your current settings (just in case - though it appears to behave with the two installations) which can typically found in C:\Users\<your username>\AppData\Roaming\krita. You can find this by navigating in File Explorer or by opening the resources folder using the Edit->Resources menu.

This includes Krita on Steam. The Krita Foundation will continue making new releases of Krita on Steam: the main difference is that proceeds from sales will now go directly to the Foundation, instead of to KO GmbH.

Valve has worked with us to transfer the application from KO GmbH to the Krita Foundation and everyone who bought Krita on Steam will continue to receive updates.